


In All Things, Chaos

by jazzfic



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-07
Updated: 2011-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 02:30:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which certain people are not immune to thoughtless actions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In All Things, Chaos

**Author's Note:**

> Write For Relief fic for always excellent Muir_Wolf &hearts

They should have never followed that triceratops.

"We should have never followed that triceratops," Grant mutters, aloud. Because some things, however obvious, don't seem real until they have been said unhappily at least once.

"Well, Dr. Grant," remarks a voice behind him, in the cynical tone of someone very much amused with life and only too happy to share it, "if you ever get around to writing your memoirs, and if I actually live through this to one day end up an old man on a sunny porch with nothing to occupy myself with but loneliness and regret...then I think you've just found your opening line."

As a way of responding that doesn't actually involve physical contact, Grant elbows past a green frond the size of an aircraft wing and gives Ian Malcolm, the bearer of this comment, a look that could happily wither bones.

"Right," he says, trying to steer them back to a purposeful conversation, "I don't think we're that far away. I just need to..." He trails off, scanning the trees.

Malcolm stops walking. Under the canopy the humidity is intense, and he's breathing hard. "Need to what?" he asks. He wipes a hand over his face, and coughs. "Damn, it's hot. Why Hammond couldn't have chosen to resurrect the woolly mammoth on an icy tundra somewhere...but oh no, he _had_ to go for the fierce and the enormous in the geographical equivalent a sauna."

Grant, still peering at the tree line, has to hide a smile. "The fierce and the...enormous?"

"Okay, look. I can calculate differential equations blindfolded and in languages now dead to humankind, but I never claimed to be at one with your beloved _Dinosauria_."

"You know, I was wondering about that."

"About what?"

"Why the old man even brought you here in the first place. Unless he was itching for an argument all along..."

Malcolm waves a hand. "Well, technically it was our representative from the legal fraternity, the delightful Mr. Gennaro, who saw fit to fly both myself and my impenetrable theories to this place. But in answer to your query, I couldn't possibly say what goes on in the doddering minds of aged entrepreneurs, let alone John Hammond's."

They duck beneath a low hanging limb. Grant makes a face. "I thought technicalities weren't your thing," he says.

"Not at all. I happen to live by their very essence. I simply possess the sort of outlook that promotes—ah, shit."

Grant turns just in time to see Malcolm sprawled on his hands and knees, the heel of one expensive-looking leather shoe caught in a tangle of vines. He wonders how someone so intelligent could have thought to come on a weekend trip to a tropical island off the coast of Costa Rica in the sort of outfit designed for a long lunch in an exclusive boardroom. That and the tinted glasses...

"Chaos?" supplies Grant, trying not to smile as he offers a hand.

Malcolm frowns, examining the state of his black shirt with a look of displeasure. "Yes, exactly. Chaos." His voice has the distracted quality of a man unaware of his surroundings, instead lost in another place entirely. "In all things..."

This is getting them nowhere. Grant sighs and wipes his hands roughly and with purpose. He looks up at the trees. "This will do," he says, and begins to climb.

 

 

-

 

He knows the type, of course. Grant has spent his entire adult life, plus most of his childhood—save for the period in which he had not quite developed the cognitive function to draw, in wobbly fashion, the shallow u-shape of a brontosaurus's long neck in green crayon—discovering, categorising, and researching creatures from a distant age, and it takes barely one look at Malcolm to recognise his type. Immune to practicalities, arrogant, striding through the world in a numerical cloud but unable to listen at the most basic level when told _don't touch that, don't follow me._

(Which is saying that Grant had some place to go when he left the field and entered the jungle, and wasn't simply trailing without proper thought after a shape imprinted in his mind, whose fossilised remnant of an egg he'd held and speculated on and made assumptions over; that he wasn't entirely immune to thoughtless actions himself. Everyone has a weakness.)

"Uh...Dr. Grant? Dr. Alan Grant who climbed a tree that looks not at all, uh, remotely climbable, leaving his fellow academic standing in the primordial forest, referring to himself in the third person to ward off a damnable and irrational fear of being alone...hello?"

Grant twists his body, swearing beneath his breath. "I _hear_ you," he snaps back. "God. Just be quiet, okay?"

There are further mutterings at this, but Grant tunes them out. He pushes at a branch gingerly. The movement jostles the limb he's balanced upon, and sets a cascade of droplets raining down from the canopy above. His eyes close automatically and he has to steady himself to stay balanced, heart pounding. It would be crazy to fall.

And then, at last, he can see.

 

 

-

 

"What?"

He lands with a thud, grins, and points with a dirt-streaked arm. "That way," says Grant.

Malcolm looks at his watch. "It's been thirty-two minutes. I'd have thought your Dr. Sattler would have left by now. Harding, too, if he had any sense."

As if to emphasise this, the sky rumbles. Grant shrugs.

"You'd be complaining to a different tune if they really had left."

"I am simply abiding by logic. Something, I might add, that magically disappeared the instant you saw that beast and decided a tag and run exercise was just what the moment needed."

Grant turns—he can't help it. His eyebrows lift beyond the rim of his hat. "Logic?" he repeats. "You were the one who followed _me._ "

"For which there is a perfectly sound explanation—"

"You like saying that, don't you? Actually, I think I read it in one of your footnotes—"

Something gleams behind those tinted glasses, and right at the moment when Grant's about to step close into the patch of muddy ground and do something he might live to regret—the ground shakes, the air shakes, _everything_ shakes with the roar of something very large, and very, very close.

They share a look, and two little words.

"Aw, _hell_."

 

 

-

 

Grant runs.

Grant runs, fighting for breath and for space to put one tired limb after another with the piercing-heat of adrenaline coursing through his body. And in the sort of abstract thought that only occurs when the mind is on the thin edge of outright panic, he wonders what it all means. How man ever managed to take over this little planet carved by meteors and ice, develop singular power of such unscaleable force, and still be at the mercy of a creature born of that same man's technology. _He's_ a part of this, Grant. He should feel guilty.

For some reason, the voice attached to these abstract thoughts sounds awfully like his co-conspirator. If he weren't on the precipice of death (or at least death's stinking hot jaws) he might think it ironic.

 

 

-

 

"Alan!"

His feet crash through thick undergrowth. It bends, snaps and gives way, and there—suddenly—he's on open ground. The field. The road, everything just as he left it.

" _Alan!_ "

Bent double, Grant gasps for air. His vision blurs— _I'm a palaeontologist, for god's sake, I dig things up, dead things, I can't be expected to..._

Something crashes into him from behind. An animal, all limbs and hot breath, frantic, clawing movement that makes his heart jump and a cry form in the back of his throat—

"Now that..." wheezes Malcolm, " _that_ was no triceratops."

Grant stares at him. He's quite perfectly lost for words.

Malcolm coughs, and peers into the distance. "Hey, looks like they did wait for us after all." He eyeballs Grant meaningfully. "By the way, I think that's Dr. Sattler there, trying to get your attention."

And with this passing note of support, the tall mathematician wanders casually out of sight.

In the distance he hears the roar again, but it seems much farther away now. Or perhaps it always was. He looks up, listening to the tail notes of Ellie's voice on the breeze. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, Grant manages an unsteady wave in her direction. He is saved the decision of whether to cheerfully strangle the retreating Dr. Malcolm, or crawl down and sleep for a week, when his legs collapse beneath him—and he is left lying on sun-warmed grass, gazing up at clouds that look for all the world like the high-crested armour of a kind and cuddly dinosaur.


End file.
